LinuxworldExpo in NYC

Adam, Chris, Geoff and I had lunch at noon and then headed over to the convention center. On the way, I found a keyboard-less Apple II (II+? IIe?) on the street. No one in the .org section of the expo floor wanted to add it to their raffle prizes, so I pulled out the CPU and the 64K memory card as nostalgic souvenirs and tossed it in a trash bin at the show. I’d like to feel special, but somehow I don’t think that half of an old Apple computer is the weirdest thing that ends up in the garbage at a Linux trade show.



Aside from some general wandering around, I spent most of the day at the NYPHP booth and the O’Reilly booth. Adam gave a XML and PHP 5 talk which was pretty well attended. XML handling is totally overhauled in PHP 5, so it’s a prime reason to upgrade when PHP 5 goes final. We signed a few books and talked to some nice customer folks. Often people I talk to at trade shows that are thinking of buying PHP Cookbook are complete PHP beginners and I have to let commerce give way to honesty and tell them that PHP Cookbook is not the best book for them to start out with. However, everyone I talked to yesterday had a small-to-medium amount of PHP experience, which made them perfect for PHP Cookbook.



After the expo floor closed, Adam and I wandered downstairs to go to a BOF about eBay’s Developer Program. Getting to the BOF room required passing through an area that Oracle had commandeered for some kind of install fest. This was fine, since they were serving food and drinks.



eBay has some neat web service APIs for listing items and searching listings, although their license terms currently make it impossible to distribute an open source application based on their APIs without first buying a “commercial” license from them for a few hundred dollars. Perhaps this will change in the future.

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